Shreveport Times Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Shreveport Times Player of the Week is and who runs it

Each week during the fall season, the Shreveport Times Player of the Week asks the public to crown a standout high school athlete in the Shreveport, Louisiana market. The organizer is the Shreveport Times, the Gannett-owned daily newspaper for northwest Louisiana. The newspaper has a long habit of turning its high school sports coverage into reader polls, and this series is one of the ways it lets the audience pick each week's top performer.

Ballots are hosted on Crowdsignal, the polling service better known by its poll.fm domain. That means the voting experience is the standard Crowdsignal one: a short list of named nominees, a single-choice ballot, a vote button, and a live results tally underneath. The voting link for this series points at the newest ballot in the run, so a reader who opens it mid-season lands directly on the current poll.

Recognition, not prize money, is the structure here. A weekly win puts a local athlete's name at the top of a public results table that classmates, families and coaches can see, and the newspaper can reference the result in its coverage. There is no published prize attached to the weekly honor.

Facts at a glance

The dated run: which seasons are confirmed and what is not published

Six seasons of this series are confirmed: 2014, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2024 and 2025. The years were identified from dated poll.fm ballots across the series, twenty-one in total, which is what lets the program be treated as an annual feature of the Shreveport Times fall calendar rather than a one-off experiment. The gap between 2019 and 2024 is real: no ballots from 2020 through 2023 are part of the confirmed run, so the series has not been uninterrupted.

Within each season, ballots run weekly from August through November. The confirmed window covers the months of fall high school football and other autumn sports in Louisiana. No specific start day in August or end day in November is published, and the organizer does not post a season schedule in advance.

The most recent ballot is dated and named: a Week 1 Player of the Week poll, now marked closed. Its results are still visible, with the leading nominee at 51 percent on 472 votes. Because that closed poll is what the voting link serves, the date of the next weekly ballot, and of the 2026 season's first one, is not printed anywhere ahead of posting; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes on a live ballot

Voting takes about a minute once a weekly poll is open. The supporter opens the poll.fm voting link, which serves the latest ballot of the series. During the August to November window that ballot is normally a live week; outside it, or in the days between polls, the link may show a closed poll with its final results displayed.

The ballot itself is a simple list. Each nominated high school athlete appears by name, and the supporter clicks the circle next to one name. There is no write-in step and no form to fill in beyond that single selection. Pressing the vote button registers the choice and immediately reveals the running tally: Crowdsignal shows every nominee with a percentage and a raw vote count, so the supporter can see exactly where the race stands after voting.

Because a fresh ballot replaces the old one each week, voting here is a habit rather than a single act. A supporter who wants a player to win Week 5 cannot vote in Week 2 and be done; the vote has to be made on the ballot that covers that week, before it closes. The exact hour a weekly poll closes is not published, which makes early voting in the week the safest approach. The mechanic a voter performs never changes between weeks: open the link, pick one name, submit.

How this ballot sits beside its Louisiana neighbours

The Shreveport Times Player of the Week is one of several high school vote series on this site for Louisiana, and its closest relative is the Shreveport Times High School Athlete of the Week, run by the same newspaper in the same city on the same platform. The two share a newsroom and a Crowdsignal setup but carry separate ballots, separate nominee lists and separate results.

Elsewhere in the state, the Baton Rouge High School Athlete of the Week and the New Orleans Area High School Athlete of the Week serve the two larger metros with similar weekly formats. Football-focused readers also have the Louisiana High School Football Player of the Week, the New Orleans Area Prep Football Player of the Week and the WAFB Sportsline Player of the Week from the Baton Rouge television station.

What distinguishes the Shreveport series is its pairing of a single daily newspaper with one northwest Louisiana market and a fall weekly rhythm. Its nominee pool draws from Shreveport-area high schools rather than a statewide or multi-city list, and its results table stays public after every poll closes, which is not true of every local vote format in the state.

Strengthening support in a poll that resets every seven days

Helping a nominee in this series works differently from helping one in a single long contest. Each weekly ballot is short-lived, so the useful window is a few days, not a month. The most reliable support is local and repeatable: share the exact poll.fm link with teammates, parents and the school's own social accounts on the day the ballot goes live, then remind people once mid-week, because the winner is decided before the next ballot replaces it.

The organizer publishes no statement on outside help or voting software for this series, so no organizer policy can be quoted here. What the format itself encourages is breadth over repetition: one selection per submission, a public tally, and a fresh nominee list weekly. A campaign that reaches a genuinely new group of supporters each week fits that format far better than any attempt to flood a single ballot. For tactics that apply across weekly reader polls, see our votes guide and the sibling athlete of the week page for the same market.